Small fixes suggested post-Katrina

WASHINGTON – The White House acknowledged Thursday that the response to Hurricane Katrina was botched because federal officials were confused, poorly prepared and communicated badly. But instead of an overhaul of the Homeland Security bureaucracy, officials proposed 125 smaller fixes.

The 11 most urgent recommendations, which the White House said are needed before the hurricane season starts this year, had been routine practices by the Federal Emergency Management Agency before it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, two former FEMA directors said Thursday.

Homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, the author of the 228-page “Lessons Learned” report, blamed former FEMA Director Michael Brown, but not his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, for the communication and leadership problems.

“The response to Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of familiarity with incident management, the planning discipline, legal authorities and field-level crisis leadership,” the report said.

The report’s recommendations span from dramatic reforms – including potentially giving the Pentagon control over the federal response in worst-case disasters – to smaller changes. It calls for a public awareness campaign on individual preparedness similar to the successful “Stop, Drop and Roll” slogan for fire safety information.

It says the government should improve its evacuation preparations, its plans for swifter medical aid and its overall blueprint for coordinating federal response efforts, calling it confusing. It also calls for state tax breaks to encourage citizens to purchase disaster gear and requirements that students take courses in first aid, starting next year.

The report, the third Katrina post-mortem issued this month by federal officials, highlighted 11 urgent changes, including the development of a roster of state, local and federal disaster relief helpers. But two former FEMA directors said that most of those changes would only be bringing back successful practices commonly used in the 1980s and 1990s.

“We did all that stuff all the time,” said James Lee Witt, who ran FEMA under President Clinton. “I don’t understand what they’re doing. It’s weird. They need to put FEMA back as an agency as it used to be.”

Gen. Julius Becton, the FEMA director under President Reagan, agreed. “I don’t know why they didn’t” keep the former practices, he said.